Flight of Passage: A True Story (29 page)

The owner removed his tattered ball-cap and ran his hand through his hair.

“Boys,” he said, “Just go. Evrabaddy’s real excited for you two. Fly hard, and you’ll make the mountains by noon.”

We refueled again at Wink, Texas, a tiny desert hamlet just south of the New Mexico border. The gas jockey there was a gaunt, unshaven ranchhand type with holes in his boots, filthy jeans, and a hideously sweat-stained straw hat. While I supervised the fueling, Kern walked across the ramp to stretch his legs.

“Ah, listen here fella,” the gas jockey called out. “Check out the hangar.”

Kern doubled back for the hangar, figuring that there must be some kind of nice airplane in there, a restored biplane or something, that the gas jockey wanted him to see.

As he filled the wing tank, the gas jockey kept looking over his shoulder toward my brother and the hangar, and he spilled gas on the fabric.

“Hey,” I said. “You’re spilling gas. Watch that wing.”

“Frig the wing. Watch your brother.”

“I said, watch that wing! You’re spilling gas.”

“And
I
said, watch your brother.”

A sound like a hundred snare drums and cymbals going off all at once resounded from the hangar, echoing off the corrugated tin walls.

Kern came running out of that hangar almost airborne. His cowboy hat blew off, and his big brown eyes were as wide open with terror as the Gettysburg dead.

Crashing into the Cub’s wing strut, Kern leaned on it for support. He was panting and heaving, trying to catch his breath. Meanwhile, the hangar in front of us was rattling and heaving with a deafening roar, like it was about to come loose from its foundation.

“Jesus Christ, Rinker. Jesus. Lord.”

The gas jockey fell off the wing, laughing hard, a mad dervish of gas hose, 80-octane fuel and clattering ladder. Haw, haw, haw, haw! He hadn’t laughed this hard in months, since he sent the last jackass in penny loafers into the same hangar.

“Snakes,” my brother expelled. “Snakes. Hundreds of them, thousands.
Rattler snakes.
”

It was true. Still bending over with laughter, the gas jockey led us over to the hangar and we crept up to the shadowy interior by the door. He threw the door wide, and the roar of rattlers went off again, so loud I held my ears. There were thousands of rattlers in there, in wire cages stacked all along the walls, with a large, open pit near the far end crawling with a hundred or more snakes all twisted around and slithering over each other. Smaller, wooden cages, stacked in the middle of the floor, held a huge colony of breeding rats—rattler food. A few of the snakes from the open pit began slithering over for the door as soon as they saw the light poking in, and Kern and I jumped back.

My father had told us a story once from his Texas days, about a young air cadet returning late at night from a drunk in town. Against all standing orders he took a shortcut through the prairie and walked across a runway. From the barracks they heard his screams, and everyone scrambled into Jeeps and drove out there. The airman was already dead, scarred by more than a dozen rattler bites. To me, it was just more barnstorming blarney, typical of my father’s need to concoct stranger, more macabre tales as his standard fare of tailspins and midair collisions wore thin over the years. Turns out, though, the one about the rattlers was true.

“Oh yeah, haven’t you heard about this?” the gas jockey asked. “Don’t you ever, ever cross a runway at night in Texas. Them rat’lers will get you before you ever see them.”

Rattlers are heat-seeking reptiles. From the frequent deaths of their mates, most of them knew to keep off heavily trafficked roads at night. But small airport runways are generally deserted, and after sunset, when the desert cools quickly, the rattlers crawl by the hundreds onto the warm macadam strips. At Wink, and a number of other airports around, the owners had developed a lucrative second income, harvesting the snakes at night with ten-foot snake poles and selling them live by the pound to meat-packing plants in Dallas and San Antonio. In some parts of Texas, fresh snake meat was still considered a delicacy. But most of it was packed like tuna into cans and shipped to Asia. Once a month, a big semi rolled into Wink and hauled off the rattlers.

The chucklehead gas jockey had a fine time describing to everyone in the pilots’ shack how he had scared the balls off another out-of-town pilot. But he had a fraction of decency left. One of the people inside told him that he’d heard about us on the radio, so he too wouldn’t let us pay for our fuel either. We were on the freebie roll again, and everyone seemed to be behind our flight now, cheering us toward the mountains. As a makeup gift, the gas jockey gave us several tins of rattler meat.

“Coast to coast, huh?” the gas jockey said. “Well, good luck. Evrabaddy’s rootin’ for ya.”

The heat was up, our height above sea level was now almost 3,000 feet, and it took us forever to get off the runway at Wink. The Cub dismally wallowed in the climb. We were just one hop away from launching for the pass, and we didn’t want any extra weight. As soon as we were out of sight, mushing up over the gray-beige desert, we threw the tins of rattler meat out the window.

Now that we had reached the hard desert, we knew that we were supposed to follow one cardinal rule: remain over highways in case the engine acted up. But from Wink we would have to fly all the way back to Pecos to pick up a road. We looked at the map and decided to take a shortcut, flying northwest until we picked up the Pecos River, which we could follow up toward Loving and then into Carlsbad, New Mexico. The midday heat had churned up some low cumulus clouds, which clung to the foothills of the Rockies in the distance, so we would have a decent horizon. We struck out over open desert for Carlsbad.

Kern let me fly, and I was enjoying it, skimming the bottom of the clouds in a Texas sky and ruddering over now and then to look for the Pecos River.

Whabang, Whabang, Whabang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang! Shit.

What was happening? Violent, irregular vibrations were shaking the plane.

The stick and rudder pedals trembled. The engine cowling up front leapt so violently on its mounts I was afraid that it was going to cut loose and cartwheel into the windshield. The airframe and fabric shook. We were finished, done for, fifty miles from the nearest airport over uninhabited desert, without so much as a dirt road underneath us. It was exactly the situation we had vowed to avoid. Instinctively I throttled back and slowed the plane.

Kern took the controls right away.

“Don’t panic Rinker! We’ve still got an airplane here. Navigate. I want to know our exact position.”

He inched the throttle forward and set up a slow flight at about sixty-five miles per hour, and we limped across the desert like that, saving every inch of height for as long as we could, with the front of the Cub banging violently and the floorboards trembling and vibrating underneath us.

We couldn’t figure out what was wrong. The rpm on the tachometer was smooth and consistent, the oil pressure and temperature normal. The engine was responding well to the throttle. It was a partial engine failure of some kind, we guessed. Four-cylinder Continentals were famous for their endurance, even with a cylinder out. We knew of pilots who had kept damaged engines running for half an hour or more. But it didn’t seem likely that we could make Carlsbad. The plane was shaking even more violently than before, and everything from the altimeter to the windows was rattling. And now the turbulence had picked up too, and it was very difficult to fly it properly in the slowed, vibrating plane. As the nose porpoised up and down, we were very uncomfortable, so drenched with sweat that our shirts were wet, and our hearts pounded along with the plane. While I looked for spots below where we might land, Kern struggled to keep the Cub straight and level and to maintain our altitude. He was extremely disciplined and levelheaded about that—he didn’t want to lose an inch of altitude until we had decided what to do.

But it was a nauseating sensation, wallowing along in a wounded plane like that, and it was hard to resist the urge to just ditch the plane. It would be a relief, going down in the desert, and I began to sweat and tremble from that horrible claustrophobia known to pilots and their passengers in a panic. At any cost, I wanted out of that plane.

“Kern! We can put her down. If we ditch sideways and wipe out the wheels, we’ll be fine.”

“No! No Rink. I’m not ditching 71-Hotel. I’ve got an airplane here. I think we can make Carlsbad.”

It was a hellish hour, getting to Carlsbad. But after about twenty minutes, by making minute adjustments to the throttle and trim, Kern found a kind of queasy, nose-up attitude that reduced the vibrations and the trembling of the controls. We were still being kited all over the place by turbulence but we could stand being in the plane.

But our trip was doomed. I knew that my brother was thinking the same thing. Every second that we ran the engine was only damaging it more. Even if we made it to an airport, we probably couldn’t afford the repairs or, more likely, the new engine we’d need. We’d have to leave the plane in New Mexico and take a Greyhound bus home. The indignity of that seemed pathetic. Everybody knew about our trip by now, and it was going to end just east of the Rockies with engine failure. And what fools we’d been. Without a radio, we couldn’t call in our position as we went down.

And the waterbag. The fucking waterbag. I looked down to the hardtack desert below us. I wasn’t the least bit worried about walking out—we both could make the fifty or sixty miles to Loving, even in our penny loafers. But we probably wouldn’t last until evening without water. Suddenly it seemed incredibly imbecilic for us
not
to have a waterbag, and incredibly wise for my father to have suggested one. We had boxed ourselves into exactly the situation he warned against. Barnstorming blarney had provided for this contingency, but we hadn’t listened.

Whabang, Whabang, Whabang! Sticks and floorboard and baggage compartment thundering, we struggled over the desert.

Making agonizingly slow progress over the scorched and rocky wasteland below, we finally picked up the Pecos River and followed it north into Loving. But it was work, nasty, hot work, all the way. When the big strip at Carlsbad came into view, my brother pushed back his cowboy hat, rested his throttle hand on the instrument panel, and handed me back his Ray-Bans to wipe free of sweat.

“Rink! We’re going to make it. We’re fucked, but we’ve made it to an airport.”

Waffling onto the runway at Carlsbad, we shut down the engine and coasted into a pile of tumbleweed on the side of the runway. I threw open the door and jumped out to inspect the engine.

As soon as I could see the plane from the outside I started to laugh.

“Kern! It’s fine!”

“What?”

“It’s just the cowling gasket! It blew off in flight. It’s nothing! Just some ripped fabric.”

The rubber and asbestos gasket that ran along the underside of the engine cowling and two of its three metal fittings were hanging down to the ground. Those fittings were another casualty of all the turbulence we’d flown the Cub through. In flight, one of the fittings had sprung loose, fell out into the slipstream and sucked the rest of the gasket out. Only one fitting held, and the rest of the assembly dangled out underneath the plane like a kite tail. The banging and vibrations were caused by the heavy metal fittings striking the landing gear and the underside of the plane as we flew along at over sixty miles per hour. The cowling was jumping up and down from the kite-tail effect of the heavy gasket and fittings billowing in the slipstream. This in turn set up secondary vibrations along the rest of the airframe that shook the plane.

The damage was relatively minor—a badly scraped landing gear, and a long, neat tear in the fabric underneath the plane—which we could probably fix ourselves. I was overjoyed that the plane wasn’t damaged any more than that. But our assault on the mountains was delayed by at least a day.

But the airport breed, a cropdusting man, in fact, saved us again. There was a large fleet of Piper Pawnee cropdusters from Seminole, Texas, working out of Carlsbad that week. They were spraying irrigated farms up around Artesia and Roswell. Every night the duster crew staged their planes back at Carlsbad for maintenance and repairs. A four-passenger Cessna-180, stuffed up past the windows with oil, parts, and tools, served as the operation’s traveling shop.

When we pulled onto the Carlsbad ramp, dragging the broken gasket along the taxiway underneath us, the crew chief for the cropdusting operation, a licensed mechanic, was lounging under the wing of the Cessna. He got up and strolled over for a look.

“Lost your gasket, huh?”

“Yeah,” my brother said, trying to hide his disappointment.

“Hey,” the duster chief said, “Are you them boys flying to California?”

“Well, we’re supposed to be,” Kern said.

“Jeez, it’s a big deal now,” the man said. “You’re all over the radio. There’s a bunch of reporters waitin’ for you in El Paso. They called here lookin’ for ya.”

“I guess they’ll have to wait until tomorrow,” Kern said. “We’ve got to get this plane fixed.”

“Tomorra? Whad’ya mean, tomorra?” the duster chief said. “It’s just a gasket—window dressing, noise abatement, extra weight. On my Pawnees here, I rip ’em off as soon as they come from the factory.”

This cheered us some, because a Pawnee was just a reconfigured and enlarged Cub, with a big engine thrown on front and the wings mounted on the bottom instead of the top. Probably this fellow knew what he was talking about.

To prove the point, the duster-chief squatted beneath the cowling, pried off the remaining fitting with a screwdriver, and ceremoniously threw the dismembered gasket across the ramp.

“There,” he said. “Now you’ve got a real airplane.”

He looked underneath the Cub, walked over to his shop-plane, and came back with linen fabric tape, coffee cans of dope, and a blowtorch.

“Lookey-here,” the duster chief said. “My planes are all up and I don’t have a thang to do until tonight. If you boys are still game, I can have this Cub airborne in an hour.”